Ashen Winter (Ashfall)

we arrived at the farm. In the bitter cold the night before, the stones had frozen together. Now we were trying to separate them without cracking the runner stone. Replacing it would take more than a week’s labor.
    Holding wedges for Darla left a lot of time to think. We were planning a birthday party for my cousin Max that night. He was turning thirteen. Everyone but Aunt Caroline and I had celebrated a birthday since I arrived on the farm. Darla had turned eighteen—two years older than I. Well, really just a year and a half.
    While Darla and I worked on the gristmill, Max, Anna, and Rebecca were in the greenhouses caring for our crop of kale. It was worth its weight in gold now—more, actually, since gold was almost worthless. You couldn’t eat gold or build anything useful with it, after all. Kale, by contrast, would grow even if the temperature in the greenhouses got close to freezing. And kale has tons of vitamin C, the only cure for scurvy, which had become an epidemic since the eruption.
    When the weather had grown so cold that even the kale started to die, Darla designed a wood-fired heating system for the greenhouses. She found a description of a similar system, a hypocaust, in one of my cousin Anna’s books, Built to Last . It had taken almost a month of back-breaking labor to build. A frozen dirt ramp led down to an enclosed oven-like space where we built a fire every night. A metal door with a small air intake covered the fire shelf. Smoke and hot air from the fire flowed up into a winding series of ducts buried under all three greenhouses, eventually escaping at the far side. That way, the fire heated the ground under our kale without filling the greenhouses with smoke. On the downside, we had to keep the fire outside the greenhouses burning every night.
    So we had to cut more wood. Luckily, my uncle’s farm backed up against Apple River Canyon State Park. We never would have cut its trees in normal times, but now we had no choice.
    That’s where Uncle Paul and Aunt Caroline had gone that day—to the edge of the leafless forest to cut firewood. Darla said they were going out there to get some “alone” time, but that didn’t seem likely to me. It was way too cold to expose any more skin than you absolutely had to.
    A crack of gunfire brought me crashing back to earth.
    Darla froze and locked eyes with me. Then we heard Anna scream.
    Darla dropped her hammer, and we dashed to the side door of the barn—the one that faced the greenhouses. I eased it ajar and peered out.
    Four men wearing ski masks and ragged forest camouflage were clustered around the door to one of our greenhouses. Max lay face down, a wide arc of blood staining the snow beside him. One of the men was prodding Max with his toe, his handgun trained on Max’s head. A man wearing a bright blue scarf had Anna on the ground, his knee in the small of her back. He was tying a gag around her head. The third seemed to be supervising everything—holding a shotgun at the ready. The last had a machine pistol trained on Rebecca. Even from a distance, I could see her shaking.
    I held my clenched fists against my roiling stomach, as if to hold it in, to hold myself together. Max. Was he dead? He wasn’t moving.
    “I’m going for help,” Darla said, and she was gone, racing for the main barn door, which faced away from the greenhouses.
    Get it together, Alex, I told myself. Darla’s getting help. Maybe there’s something you can do in the meantime.
    The bandits were preoccupied with their task—none of them were looking my way. I opened the side door wider, dropped to my belly, and slithered through. Immediately I wormed off the trodden path into the deep snow. The snow slowed me down, but it also hid me.
    When I thought I was close, I cautiously raised my head above the level of the snow. The bandits had a homemade toboggan, laden with lumpy canvas bags. They’d gagged and bound Anna and Rebecca, stacking them on the toboggan like cordwood. Machine Pistol was leaving one of the greenhouses with a plastic sack overflowing with kale. He’d harvested it so fast that he’d pulled up the roots. Blue Scarf stepped over to Max’s body, hefted it, and tossed it on top of the load. Blood pulsed from Max’s temple.
    I blinked repeatedly, but my eyelids couldn’t clear the gruesome scene. My body was coiled tight, caught on a knife edge between two fears: I needed to help Max, to see if he was even alive, but I couldn’t move,